Product Description
This groundbreaking volume on Richard Pousette-Dart is the most comprehensive publication on his painting to be published since the artist’s death. It provides fresh insights into his oeuvre by five outstanding, contemporary art historians, who have interpreted the artist’s creative output from the 1930s to 1992.

Richard Pousette-Dart, one of the founding members of the New York School, created paintings, drawings, sculptures, and journals for over sixty years. The youngest member of the first generation of American Abstract Expressionists, Pousette-Dart shared with his fellow artists’ interests in psychology, myth-making, anthropology, and both African and American tribal art. Along with Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Motherwell, and others, Pousette-Dart created the art movement known as The New York School.

This book presents the evolution of Richard Pousette-Dart’s styles and philosophy and provides an in-depth look at his ever-evolving painting techniques. The essays focus on his major themes and periods, and include his contributions to the complexity of the intellectual and stylistic language of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

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Note: My style of painting is abstract. My photography modern aesthetic. I admire the Abstract Expressionists such as Dart as much as I admire Ansel Adams, Ed Weston, Paul Strand or Imogen Cunningham. Dart surpassed AE style with his own Jung inspired mysticism. I think of him as our American Kandinsky. If you look at the works of art and mandala paintings of Jung in his Red Book, there are in many cases remarkable similarities. Jung’s book however was not published until just two years ago.

With this work of 1941–42, Pousette-Dart, then twenty-five years old, became the first of the Abstract Expressionists to make a mural-size painting. The monumental, heroic scale is integral to the artist’s fundamental goals, expressive of highly personal, mystical beliefs that are as all-encompassing and vast as the work itself seemed at the time. Pousette-Dart worked in several media simultaneously, including painting and photography, and he also wrote a great deal, including poetry, art theory, and a host of other observations. He left more than 200 diaristic notebooks, providing an exceptional snapshot of the world view that shaped his art making. In a notebook probably written in 1940, he wrote, “Art is only significant as it takes us to the whole man and gives us new insights and opens secrets toward the unknown heart of our total mystic awareness.” He also wrote, “My definition of religion amounts to art and my definition of art amounts to religion. … Art and religion are the inseparable structure and living adventure of the creative.”

Like other Abstract Expressionists during the 1940s, Pousette-Dart looked to the art of other cultures for inspiration in seeking meaningful content. African, Pacific, Pre-Columbian, and American Indian art were seen as vehicles to express what Pousette-Dart described as “transcendent”—beyond empirical experience. This densely packed composition is organized around a structured grid that emerges sporadically. But Pousette-Dart breaks away from a basic Cubist structure to develop a new artistic vocabulary. Circles, teardrops, ovals, arcs, diamonds, and crosses evoke cosmic and organic forms, a rhythmic spread in black, white, and earth tones with points of bright color. Here and there, a nuanced reference to something identifiable emerges: perhaps a bird at the lower left, or some primitive weaponry at the upper left. The paint surface is layered, reworked, evidence of the artist’s process of decision making in creating the work of art. The linear grid is apparent and principle elements are all outlined. But the image as a whole seems to pulsate in and out of focus. Pousette-Dart wanted an art that was “mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.”

NY Times Excerpt: Born in St. Paul in 1916 and raised on art by a painter-writer (his father) and a poet-musician (his mother), Pousette-Dart found his focus early. With almost no formal training he was in New York and working by his early 20s, his art spurred by his friendship with the artistic gadfly John Graham and his absorption of Freud and Jung, Northwest Indian and Oceanic art and European modernism.

RELATED: RELOADING THE CANON at Michael Rosenfeld Museum – click here

And this covert view…

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This blog wishes to encourage others to take the path to well-being through learning more about aesthetics, art, culture, economics, history, literature, philosophy, politics, psychology, the environment, and healthy living.
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